You probably wouldn’t know it from headlines of most media outlets, but the recent victories for leftist parties in France and the United Kingdom were not nearly as sweeping as has been portrayed.
Yes, the Labour Party won a landslide victory in the U.K., putting the left-wing party in charge of the government for the first time in 14 years. And in France, the far-left New Popular Front will have the most seats in a deeply divided government in which no party will have a majority.
The prevailing thought would be, then, that the ascendance of conservative parties in these countries was overstated and that the people were yearning for leftist governance as they delivered a stinging rebuke of conservative parties.
But if one looks past the noise and the spin from the media and political establishment, a very different image begins to emerge: an image that shows a floundering centrist establishment losing its political power while the supposedly defeated “far-right” is ascendant and inching ever closer to securing significant political power.
In the U.K., the Conservative Party that ruled the country for 14 years lost 251 seats. But the Labour Party that replaced it only increased its vote share by 2 percentage points from the election in 2019, when the Conservatives won in a landslide. Instead, the Conservative Party that effectively governed as a center to center-left party lost nearly 20% of its 2019 vote share.
So where did all of those voters go? Not to Labour and not to the Liberal Democrats, a centrist party that increased its vote share by less than 1 point but won 64 additional seats. It went to the more conservative Reform U.K., a populist party led by Nigel Farage, the charismatic but controversial face of the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union.
Reform U.K. earned 14% of the national popular vote, more than 2 points more than the Liberal Democrats, but due to the country’s first-past-the-post electoral system, the party won only five seats.
In short, the story is not so much that Labour earned the confidence of the voters but rather that the Conservative Party lost the voters who were once eager to support them. And while Labour will rule the U.K. for the next five years, the ascendance of Reform U.K. will loom as an enormous shadow over the next general election that will occur no later than 2029.
The story in France is far more complicated. But the results of Sunday’s second-round parliamentary elections were far from the rebuke of Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally party that it was portrayed as.
To begin with, no party received as many votes as the National Rally party did. But that support did not translate into seats. The party received 37% of the vote, more than 10 points more than any other party. But due to the electoral system of the nation, both the far-left New Popular Front and Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble party secured more seats in the nation’s Parliament.
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Nevertheless, the National Rally won 53 more seats in Parliament than it won in the previous election. The only reason that the result was seen as a disappointment for the Right was due to pre-election projections that the party would be the largest in Parliament.
The French Parliament will now be so bitterly divided that gridlock will rule in the short term, and new elections will loom as a possibility as long as the current partisan makeup of the legislature endures. No party secured even close to the number of seats necessary to form a working majority, and a coalition between bitterly divided rivals seems unlikely. Should new elections be called before 2029, the National Rally’s rise is likely to continue, and the revival of the Left in France will prove to be nothing more than a mirage.
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